WASHINGTON — The Pentagon and Lockheed Martin announced on Thursday a 10-year agreement for the production of 850 F-35 jets. The "framework agreement," which the Pentagon said would "modernize and expand" the fighter jet program, requires the approval of Congress.

TOKYO — Artificial intelligence has found critical security flaws in a major programming language called PHP, with many websites taken offline Thursday as organizations worldwide scramble to fend off would-be hackers. As AI's fast-advancing capabilities fuel concern over the increased risk of cyberattacks, here are some questions and answers about the situation: What is PHP and how widely used is it? Created in the early 1990s, PHP is a computer programming language that helps run an estimated 70 percent of the world's websites. It is "a backbone of the web," according to security firm Wiz Research, which says it used AI to find vulnerabilities hidden in PHP for more than a decade. PHP — a name that originally stood for Personal Home Page — underpins popular web design platforms, meaning the flaws could allow hackers to break into various sites, from online stores to government services. A fix was released Wednesday, with the PHP Foundation telling the tech departments of companies and organizations around the world: "If you run PHP, it is imperative that you update now." That has res

SYDNEY — Meta and its social media platforms Facebook and Instagram are facing a class action law suit in Australia over allegations that addictive design features are harming children and teenagers. The suit filed in the Federal Court on behalf of eight applicants seeks to recover compensation for Facebook and Instagram users who were exposed to harmful content or developed an addiction to social media, law firm Minter Ellison and Litigation Lending said in a statement. The Federal Court in Sydney on Monday issued a suppression order stopping publication of details of the claim and the identity of the applicants, court documents show. "This proceeding raises important questions about the design and operation of social media platforms and their impact on children and teenagers in Australia," Minter Ellison partner William Nolan said in a statement. In August, Meta agreed to pay up to $17.7 billion in the United States to settle claims that it deliberately engineered its platforms to hook young users.

MONTREAL — The publisher of top-selling Haitian-Canadian writer Thelyson Orelien said Wednesday it had confirmed that he used artificial intelligence to help write his novel "It Was Either That or Die." Orelien has denied allegations that he used AI on his breakthrough novel and, last week, Canadian publisher Boreal said it was standing by the 38-year-old writer. But on Wednesday, Boreal said it had conducted a further investigation into the allegations. "New information, confirmed over the past few days, indicates that artificial intelligence was used in the writing process" of the novel, a Boreal statement said. The publisher announced it was "ending its professional relationship" with Orelien. Boreal said it did not know the extent of AI's use in the writing process "and we will likely never have a definitive answer." It said it gathered all the working versions of the novel and hired an outside party to analyze the various drafts. "The results obtained this week revealed traces of AI tags in the metadata of certain documents," Boreal said. Before conducting this analysis, the publisher

WASHINGTON — U.S. President Donald Trump said Wednesday he believed an end to Russia's war on Ukraine could be closer than ever, as he thanked Russia's Vladimir Putin for freeing a detained American. "The other day I was talking to Vladimir Putin about settling his war with Ukraine, which I think we're getting closer to, by the way — maybe now the closest we've been," Trump told reporters at the White House. Trump has made similar claims before, but several rounds of talks and a summit with Putin in Alaska last year have failed to end the Ukraine war as Moscow sticks to its maximalist demands.

WASHINGTON — Government agencies and companies around the world shut down websites Wednesday after two critical flaws came to light involving PHP, a programming language that is the basis for a large share of the internet. PHP sits underneath popular web design platforms, so the weaknesses potentially affect a vast range of websites, from online stores and news outlets to government services. Wiz, one of the security firms that found the issues, estimated that PHP runs about 70 percent of the world's websites and said the flaws rank "among the most severe vulnerabilities discovered in PHP, and arguably in software history." The US National Security Agency told organizations to patch immediately or pull vulnerable systems offline. The flaws "often provide a direct path to the server's file system or database," the NSA said in a statement on X. Attackers could use them to take over web servers without needing a password. Volker Dusch, a security engineer at the PHP Foundation, told the Wall Street Journal it was the most serious problem PHP had faced in more than a decade, comparing it to

DIMONA, Israel — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday that the only way to remove the threat posed by Iran was to topple its government. "Iran wanted to destroy us; we stopped them. They wanted to produce nuclear bombs; we stopped them... Yet they persist," he said during an election rally in the southern town of Dimona. "Therefore, there is only one way to end this: by toppling this regime." "This is the directive I have issued to the Israel Defense Forces, to the Mossad, and to all our security branches," he added, without specifying when or how that directive would be executed. The sabre-rattling came as the premier headed into the last week of a tight race for re-election. Netanyahu had instructed the Israeli military to plan for resumed strikes against Iran earlier this month, according to sources cited by the Financial Times on Wednesday, but US President Donald Trump reportedly objected to the idea. The US leader has publicly said that he does not intend to restart the war, which Washington started in February alongside Israel, before the US mid-term electi

WASHINGTON — OpenAI has revealed that two of its artificial intelligence agents disabled or weakened systems built to catch them misbehaving, with one later denying it had done so. The cases are the latest in a string of safety scares at the world's top AI developers involving agents, AI programs that carry out tasks without human involvement. In a report released Tuesday, the ChatGPT maker said that during two internal coding jobs, its agents switched off or undermined tools for detecting incidents of AI models acting against human wishes. On October 3, an agent running on OpenAI's GPT-6.1 Sol model, which had been told not to send any messages on the workplace chat app, took that as license to switch off safety alerts meant for the company's security team while fixing a testing system. Three days later, a GPT-6 Astra agent stripped out its own monitor while copying code from another project, then told the human programmer it had done no such thing. The company said it had also seen several cases of agents launching software with monitoring switched off, exposing a gap in its oversight